


ending one minute at a time

by Ymir14



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Gen, Mental Health Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-31
Updated: 2015-12-31
Packaged: 2018-05-10 19:17:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5597725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ymir14/pseuds/Ymir14
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He wishes time would stop and leave him here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ending one minute at a time

**Author's Note:**

> I just wanted to say goodbye to the year of Evangelion. Honestly, this series has been so comforting to me for so long, and I wanted to see if I could capture some of it's allure, condense it down, boil my feelings down before the new year. I don't think I had enough time to really do with this what I wanted, but I think I succeeded in sharing the headspace it brought me to.
> 
> The title is a quote is from Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk. The full quote from the book is "This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time." I thought it complemented a lot of the temporal themes well.
> 
> I hope this is a sufficient ode, for now. Evangelion has always been a carthasis for me.

He’s on the train again, headphones in, and the soundtrack plays again, and again, and again, it’s familiar and it almost makes him sick, and the flashing lights from everything and anything going by is blinking in and out when he closes his eyes.

You wind up at one place, and go to another, and if you go back, it’s never the same place again. It’s changed while you were gone, and it hurts to admit, but Shinji knows it’s the same thing for people. You’re never the same no matter how hard you try to escape the mistakes that made you. That you’re making again and again like how rain comes and dries up.

Shinji knows this, but can’t stop.

He knows he can’t keep running away, but it seems so much less disgusting to fail on his own terms than fail on someone else’s. It felt less real. More real. More painful. Who was he punishing, himself or other people?

And in the summer comes the cicadas, and Shinji is left to wonder if they’re the same ones from six years ago. Wonder if it makes him feel old, or new. Relive some moments, or forget them. It doesn’t matter, he stays frozen to his seat as people come in, and leave like waves on a beach or the tide through the day, and he’s stuck.

Maybe next stop.

It’s like the world was a tidal wave, trying to swallow him whole, and he’s just a rivulet of water, fallen from the sky and running off a leaf and he can’t run from a world filled with problems when he’s already a problem on his own.

He wishes time would stop and leave him here.

Shinji could sort things out, if he had the time. If he had time to curl around himself and try to be the person he still needs. Maybe. Maybe he’d just lie down, and stay there. It can’t be like that. The world is moving regardless of whether or not he is, and leaving him behind.

The train stops again, people in, people out.

There’s a forest of thoughts in groves and knowing is different from being, and Shinji never asked for any of this, for his father, tragedy, to be a failure, to be a coward. He’s not a coward, but he is, and the moment he gets off this train, it’ll only confirm it. Everything had grown together, grown apart. His ideas were all burning down and all he could do is watch.

The music in his ears starts over, again, and it’s so familiar, every beat, every note, and it’s so comforting it’s sickening. This metal compartment is his sanctuary, his coffin.

And down comes the rain, not real rain, the quiet feeling that would be rain if rain could be felt in a way that wasn’t physical, drenching you to your core. You end up as who you are after too many years, having it splatter against your skin and forget whoever you were trying to be. He wishes he could forget, or maybe stop becoming who he already is, has already been for so much time.

Red and pink and orange floods in through the windows. His mistakes were already made but they didn’t feel like they were real yet. Not until he left. Shinji closes his eyes, lets the world pass him by, the and bitter feeling build up in the back of his mouth.

He should head back. He should disappear. He should give in. He should give up. He should stop being such a failure.

He should get off next stop, this stop, and catch the next train back.

But, he can’t move.

Shinji knows he has to, needs to, doesn’t have a choice, wants to do something, change his path in life and do something so he won’t be so pathetic, but, it doesn’t happen. It never does. It never can. He never will. He wants to.

The music stops, starts over again. He feels stuck in his shoes. In this place. He needs to go.

He stays.


End file.
